Some of you may remember "Stikfas," the customizable action figure I linked to several months ago. I can't praise these things any higher... they're like the next Lego of the toy world. I've only found them on sale at Toys-R-Us for $9, but they're worth the search. A basic kit will give you a base body, several decals and a slew of weapons; everything you need to make your own posable action figure. It's a great desktop toy and makes for a nice, portable artist reference when you need to draw a certain pose. But that's only scratching the surface.

Diehard Skitfas fans love these toys because they're easy to customize. Since they're just blank out of the box, there's nothing in the way for a little acrylic paint and Sculpey clay. People have made custom figures of everything from famous comicbook heroes to original characters and beyond. Believe me, you can do some really cool things with Stikfas.

So after having my Stikfas figure sit idle on my desktop for a few months, I finally decided to give this customizing stuff a try. What better way to make the first official Breakpoint City action figure?

Our base was the black "Alpha Male Military" figure. I got a few bottles of acrylic paint from the RIT bookstore and applied coats to the disassembled figure. Granted, my paint job isn't perfect, but I'd rather have a custom action figure I can play with than one collecting dust on a bookshelf. After a few coats, I sprayed the figure with glossy Testor's lacquer to keep the paint from chipping off.

Next came the head. The Stikfas head is relatively small; great if you're working on a human-scale character, but let's face it, Ben is a cartoon. His head is the size of a watermelon. So with a nice chunk of Sculpey baking clay, I modeled a more cartoony head over the existing one. Most of my characters don't translate to 3D very well, but Ben's face turned out surprisingly well. I used the metal inside of a twist-tie to make the glasses. After a quick bake and spray lacquer, he was ready to go

Ben is fully posable and still retains some balance, despite the extra weight in the head-ular region. Overall, I think Ben turned out really great; a wonderful addition to the ever cluttered desktop. Now everyone can look forward to one of those cheesy action figure comics if I get really lazy. Oh, and no, he's not for sale.

Lo and behold, right when Ben was finished I received another Stikfas figure for Christmas. This one is a "Delta Boy" model, smaller than the Alpha Male. Could a "Dan the Dog" Stikfas figure be on the horizon? Stay tuned...